셀카 (selka)

What it means

1. 1.

   A selfie. Korean coined its own word years before English settled on one, and kept it.

2. 2.

   셀카봉 is a selfie stick; 셀기꾼 — 셀카 plus 사기꾼 ('fraudster') — is someone whose selfies look nothing like them.

Examples with translations

• 셀카 한 장만 찍자.

  Let's just get one selfie.

• 셀카는 각도가 생명이야.

  With selfies, the angle is everything.

Where it comes from

셀프 카메라, 'self camera' — an English-shaped compound built in Korean that no English speaker says. Korea's early camera phones meant the word was in wide use by the mid-2000s.

First attested: early 2000s

Other forms

Romanised as:

selka